By a practitioner from Mainland China

(Clearwisdom.net) One afternoon on my way home from school, I was walking alongside a colleague. We were pushing our electric bicycles down the road. All of a sudden, the handles of our bikes got tangled up and we both fell down. My colleague was barely scratched but I'd torn my clothes and had bruises on my arms and legs.

This incident was like being hit on the head with a club. I sat down and quietly looked inside myself. I pondered this issue seriously: Why did I fall down?

There were several things I discovered. First, when I carefully searched inside myself to find where I had gone wrong, I found that I'd always carried a particular thought: after learning Falun Dafa, I would not have any problems. Especially when I saw traffic accidents on the road, it would deepen this thought of mine that I would be safe since I had learned Falun Dafa. I realized that I have had this thought for a very long time. Six months ago, when a colleague had a small accident and passed out in front of me, I thought that she would've been fine if she'd learned Falun Dafa or knew that Falun Dafa is good.

I had been using Falun Dafa as an umbrella of protection without realizing it.. This was an attachment to pursuit. After studying the Fa for a long time, I hadn't found my fundamental attachment. Now I've understood the principle behind it and seen that I've been attached to the benefits that Falun Dafa has given me.

I began practicing Falun Dafa at first in order to get rid of my health problems, hoping that Dafa would give me a healthy body. Whenever people commented on my good health, I'd feel so happy inside, secretly gloating over the fact that I'd learned Falun Dafa. I was also attached to Dafa's power to make me youthful. Although I'd never say it, this selfish attachment was deeply rooted in my mind. The attachment affected how well I did the three things. It made me become lost in ordinary society and go after the happy life of an ordinary person and forget the great historical responsibility that I shoulder.

Second, the evil factors are ubiquitous and we have to maintain righteous thoughts all the time so that the evil is unable to affect us. On Party Withdrawal Day, July the 1^st, evil party propaganda filled the television and my non-practitioner family members kept watching. I tried persuading them to stop watching, but instead, I became influenced myself. A few evil party songs even surfaced in my mind on my way to work. Immediately I realized that it was the evil party factors at work and I began sending forth righteous thoughts to clear them away.

Thinking about it now, it was I that had allowed these evil party factors to be present. I had acknowledged them and therefore they were able to interfere with me. Master has taught us, "Poison is just poisonous, and if you want it to stop being poisonous it can't do that." ("Teaching the Fa at the 2002 Fa Conference in Philadelphia, U.S.A.") We have to maintain righteous thoughts all the time and clear these poisonous factors from our minds--reject them and uproot them. At the same time, as practitioners, balancing our relationships at home is also a part of our cultivation. Master has taught us in many lectures that we have to balance our family relationships well. However, I have not done well enough in this regard.

Third, by reflecting on myself, I found that I also have a very strong attachment to showing off and being too engrossed. The day before yesterday, I bought a pair of pants and felt very good about it. They were cheap and comfortable, and I showed them off to my colleagues. When my written article got published on the Minghui website, I was very happy and became overjoyed. When fellow practitioners said that I cultivated very well in certain areas, I was also very happy.

It is all these little things in my life that made me fall down in my cultivation path. As a cultivator, we should use the Fa to restrain our attachments all the time and do well on every step of our cultivation path.

Posting date: 10/10/2006
Original article date: 10/10/2006
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Translated on 9/28/2006
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2006/9/24/138273.html

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